Riding the Waves
by Shieldage
Summary: With Angel's son, Connor, kidnapped, Fred calls Sunnydale. It's their Season Six Finale so *really* not the best time to ask for help.
1. From the Store to the Street

BtVS/Angel by Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Hmm, Angel Season 3's 'Sleep Tight' aired in March 2002 and Buffy Season 6's 'Grave' in May, so the timeline may be a trifle skewed... Oh well, at least both scenes happen at night. Spoilers ahead. Taking a cue from Hotpoint and adding info blocks at the ends of these chapters.

Thank you, _Buffyworld dot com_, for reference materials. Written for Weaver's "Oops, Wrong Dimension" Challenge at _Twisting the Hellmouth_

* * *

***Ring-Ring***

"You've called the Magic Box after hours. Willow speaking."

"Thank God! I tried calling Buffy but no-one picked up at her house."

"She's back in the training room catching up with Giles. Want me to-"

"No, this is Fred, from L.A. We're all in trouble down here and we need someone powerful with the mojo."

"What's up?"

"Angel has a baby boy, Wesley stole him to give to this hunter from last century and there's this time/space demon who's claiming responsibility for everything."

"Whoa and they say I'm mighty with the babble. When did this happen?"

"The hunter guy just left here, he didn't have Connor, so Wesley hasn't handed him over yet. We need help now!"

"Time/space demon you say? Sounds like a really powerful spirit practically bursting with energy. I've only teleported once or twice before, so I don't know if I can get to you immediately. I'll try doing it in short hops."

"Thanks! We're still at the Hyperion."

"No worries. I'll be down as soon as I can."

* * *

**Angel's Headquarters, Los Angeles**

Fred put down the phone and whirled around to hug Gunn.

"She's going to be here," she cried into his chest. "We're all going to be okay."

* * *

**Anya and Giles' Shop, Sunnydale**

Still laughing, Buffy and Giles strode into the main room of the Magic Box.

"Hey, Anya, thanks for getting the phone," Buffy said. "Who was it-"

The Slayer froze in place, having realized that Anya was unconscious and being held off the floor by the neck.

"Willow!" Giles warned, readying a spell behind his back. "Put her down immediately."

"Sure, why not? It's not like I can absorb her ability to bend time and space. She just taps into it and the people higher up the chain from her can cut off the flow. Me? I'm hungry."

Anya fell to the floor as Willow rose off the ground. Cursing, Giles released a green fireball, but it was too late to aim properly as the black-haired witch was moving too fast. Before he could do anything else, she'd burst through the ceiling, leaving a giant gaping hole in her wake.

"Giles," yelled Buffy as she grabbed her Watcher by the shoulders. "What are we going to do?"

"I have a contact who can track phone records, so we should be able to find out who called with little effort. I just hope we can warn them in time."

* * *

**Cavern of someone who's been pulling strings, Greater Los Angeles Area**

Sahjahn was relaxing in his cave, when a large gust of wind poured into the room, stirring up a large cloud of dust which blew right through him.

He waved at the air ineffectually, trying to get a clear view at whoever had appeared in the room. "Will people please stop doing that," he asked. "It's bad enough that I'm immaterial, but this makes me feel like I should be having a coughing fit."

The first thing he saw of the intruder was her hand, emerging from the space his neck apparently occupied.

"Oh please," he snorted, turning around to face the black-eyed witch. "What are you, here to exact vengeance on Angel's behalf? I can smell the need all over you, and I haven't done anything _really_ bad to him yet."

"Looks like you're going to be a tough nut to crack," Willow said, her eyes glinting in a vaguely alien way. "I don't suppose you'd care to phase into this reality, so we could duke it out on a fair playing field?"

"Sorry, sister. This is the effect of a curse. I think you're more in the mood for making them then breaking them right now."

"True. Could I help you with that? It's a bit hard to eat you right now, and I'm hungry."

"Considering that I haven't secured my future yet, no thanks. Don't get me wrong, I don't fear _you_, by any... Now, wait, seems like some of the pieces I've set up are falling into each other. You're welcome to tag along, don't see how I could stop you, considering you 'smelled' me all the way in here. I'd much appreciate it if you slaughtered everything in sight, though I doubt you will. Seems like people just aren't taking instructions like that to heart."

Willow snarled, glancing around the room quickly. She needed more time, because the dark magics writhing inside her had _felt_ something change when her arm had been apparently occupying the same space as Sahjahn's incorporeal body.

Spotting something, she got his attention. "Hold on, if you're so mister-immaterial-pants, how come you have a computer?"

"What," Sahjahn said, a look of bemused irritation on his face. "I'm empowered with dimensional shifting energy, surely you realize that such a small quantum effect is not beyond my reach?"

The demon waved his hand above the computer's screen and a webpage popped up. Strains of the whistling pursuit theme from 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' emerged from the speakers as Sahjahn shimmered out of reality.

Willow nodded. "Nice." When she realized she was alone in the room, she took a deep breath and teleported out of the cavern.

She approached Sahjahn's new location in short hops, in hopes of avoiding any traps left for her. Currently in a dark frame of mind, she knew that if she had the ability, she'd have overlapped herself with solid stone in hopes of squishing any pursuers teleporting directly in.

Her final hop left her on a bridge in Los Angeles as a standoff played out in the street below.

##

Angel, whom she hadn't seen since last apocalypse season, shortly after Buffy's death, was facing down a small army of commandos and a woman in a sharp dressed suit. He was holding a single pistol but, as she could hear him saying, being a vampire his chances for survival were a lot better than any of them.

A man and a woman in leather jackets were standing beside a minivan. The dark-haired man was holding a baby as if it was a weapon or a bargaining chip and the woman looked seriously beat up.

Behind them stood the scarred and brooding figure of Sahjahn, ignored by all, except Willow. She could feel the vast reserve of power flowing into him, ready to be released at his command.

She was aware of how she looked from the outside, her eyes pitch black, her hair dark, her skin pale and veiny. Separate from the rage at her lover's death and the intoxicating effects of the magic she'd ingested, there was a small part of her that was geeking out over her look and newfound powers, so she decided to make her appearance as theatrical as possible.

As she lept from the bridge, a calculating portion of her mind hoped that her entrance would disrupt Sahjahn's concentration long enough for her to form a plan.

Black clothes fluttering in an artificial wind, head tilted forwards, legs stretched out behind her, blue lightning crackling at her fingertips, she traced a wide arc down towards the ground, as if sliding on an artificial ramp.

She had positioned herself perfectly, so that the very tips of her shoes brushed the concrete as her body passed through Sahjahn from behind, finally coming to a standing rest directly in front of him.

Groaning in disgust, Sahjahn leaned to one side in order to see the reaction of the rest of the group.

Willow stood in silence for a second, considering exactly what she'd felt while passing through Sahjahn, because she could somehow tell it wasn't a true overlap. She was convinced that the portions of his body that would have shared space with her solid matter had immediately phased even further out of touch with her reality as they came into contact with her flesh, then phasing back into place behind her.

One of the commandos, his eyes having been trained on Angel's gun, was so stunned by Willow's arrival that he acted on instinct, sending a stream of bullets in her direction.

Whipping her hand up, a smirk crossed her face as the bullets froze in mid-air. She sent all but one flying into the chest and left leg of Angel, carefully avoiding the spine and major arteries as she wanted to save him in hopes of later 'play.'

As the vampire fell to the ground in pain and shock, Willow held out her hand, the remaining bullet bobbing gently in the air above her raised palm. "I don't like being shot at," she said, her eyes trained on the sharp-dressed woman at the head of the armed troops. "Let's just say I've had a bad experience recently. You know, if this were a fairy tale, you'd obviously be the wicked stepmother and something inside me is just _screaming_ that I should be the prettiest one here."

Willow released the bullet from her hand at high speeds just as Sahjahn shouted some magic words, the power he'd been massing having reached its peak. The distraction turned what should have been a fatal shot on Lilah into a deep furrow down the flesh of the right side of her chest.

Lilah staggered, clutching her side. She barely managed to keep her feet, blood welling between her fingers as she watched in horror the demon she'd been dismissing as an impotent observer rip an orange hole in the fabric of reality the size of a Greyhound bus.

Sahjahn gloated, reveling in the looks on their faces as even Willow backed up a couple steps. "What you are looking into is the Quor-Toth, the darkest of the dark worlds. So - I can widen the portal and you can all be swallowed up by a world you can not begin to imagine - or you can insure the immediate and final death of that _child_!"

Willow walked slowly towards the couple by the car, examining her situation. She had been unable to get a fix on exactly what had happened when the spell keeping Sahjahn separate from her reality had reacted to her solid flesh, but it suddenly occurred to her that the problem had been trying to observe her own energies from the outside. If the effect was quantum...

Justine reached for a knife as she moved to block Willow's path. Willow said 'Stab yourself,' and kept walking forward, her eyes trained firmly on the man, not really caring exactly how the older woman carried out the command.

As Holtz moved to snap the baby's neck, his only concern causing Angel pain, Willow said 'Love me.'

Holtz sank to his knees, bloody tears running down his face as Willow gently lifted Connor from his unresisting arms.

Willow began steadily walking towards Sahjahn.

"What do you think you're doing," the demon asked. "Shouldn't you be killing him now? I can follow you just as easily as you can follow me, and I won't get tired."

Willow commented on the lightning flickering out of the portal, striking the ground nearby in random spots.

"Well," Sahjahn said, glancing over his shoulder. "I saw your entrance. Can't you jus-"

Willow took the moment of distraction to plunge the baby, held straight ahead of her with both arms, deep into the demon's chest.

Having given the phasing curse on Sahjahn a target separate than herself, Willow could plainly see the energy ripple emanating from Connor's contact with the demon. Reaching into that fine thread of energy with tendrils of dark magic, she began sucking lifeforce directly out of Sahjahn himself.

Sahjahn grimaced in pain not felt in centuries as part of his physical being phased out of reality and then simply ceased to exist. Realizing that he was starting to shrink, he tried running, but found he could not move more than a few inches in any direction. The last thing to disappear was his ritually scarred face, overlapping the baby's own for a few seconds, before vanishing forever.

Willow watched in amazement as the baby began glowing with a bright golden light, his incandescent outline visible even through the thick blanket.

When the baby faded to the pale grey of concrete, she tried moving it closer to her, a thin thread of genuine concern welling up from somewhere deep inside herself, only to find she could not budge him in any direction. Slowly releasing her arms, she stood, gobsmacked, as the baby continued to float in mid-air.

Turning around, she saw that the color had gone out of the rest of the world as well. Angel and the commandos were motionless statues, not a single breath of air stirred the scattered trash, besides the faint breeze emanating from the portal.

Finding a crumpled newspaper on the concrete as impossible to move as Connor, she sighed and shook her head.

The orange alieness of the land beyond the portal had changed. Now, no colors were revealed through it beyond the bright blue of the sky and the green of the trees. Left with few obvious choices, she stepped through the altered portal, abandoning the colorless world behind her.

##

Angel blinked in the brief second of sunlight emanating from the portal, before the view changed again, this time to deep jungle, a canopy of leaves blocking the sky. Refocusing his eyes, he saw that Willow had apparently disappeared at the instant of Sahjahn's death, although his son still hung in mid-air.

As the golden glow faded from Connor, he slowly began to sink towards the ground. At the same time, the portal wavered and began to shrink into itself.

Angel was still somewhat in shock at how events had tilted so quickly out of control, but one thing was clear to him. Although the otherworldly threats to his son's life had apparently canceled each other out, there was still the crack team of Wolfram & Hart commandos who would likely earn a bonus if they retrieved Connor for the law firm's research division.

Angel struggled to his good leg, wary of putting weight on the one riddled with bullets, the wounds to his chest having sorted themselves out, more or less.

As one, the commandos not attending to Lilah's wounds, charged past the vampire towards the baby.

Holtz was faster, his charge unexpected. He intercepted the sinking form of Connor as if catching a football and disappeared through the portal before it could close.

* * *

**Some time later. Deep in the wilds of the reality known to some as 'Hollow-Earth'**

Cautiously, Tarzan approached the spot where he'd hidden a stolen treasure chest months before, the amphitheater of the great apes.

In this place, under the full moon, he'd heard the drums of the apes as they prepared themselves for war, seen them tear into the flesh of their captives, but he'd never heard this sound before, here or elsewhere.

##

It was a high rolling call, not unlike that of the panther, Sheeta, as she stalked her prey...

* * *

_This is the point where Willow, following her girlfriend's death, has gone on a dark magic binge. Giles contained her, temporarily, until Anya succumbed to her magically boosted telepathy and released her. Sahjahn is a killer demon of a species made immaterial by agents of Wolfram and Hart. This gave him the ability to travel through time. All his relatives seem to have been killed off or imprisoned, so maybe it was worth it. Having found prophecies predicting his own death, Sahjahn had made several attempts on Connor's life, most notably by bringing the eighteenth century demon hunter Daniel Holtz to the present in hopes of preventing the child's birth. While Holtz had his own reasons to hate Angel, he refused to take orders from a demon he despised and quickly formed his own vigilante group, in hopes of turning Angel's own family against him._


	2. A Giant Clearing

BtVS/Angel by Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

* * *

**Coastal Africa, 'Hollow-Earth'**

When Tarzan reached close enough to see the source of the wail, he realized it was the sound of a human child. He, or at least Tarzan assumed it was a he, having few references to draw from, had been loosely wrapped in cloth and laid upon a leather jacket in the center of the large natural clearing.

Tarzan knew there was only one thing this could be: Bait in a trap. He looked up in time to see the branch swinging towards his head. While he was able to smoothly deflect it, the knife aimed towards his ribs caught him unprepared.

The knife sank an inch into the flesh of his chest before he was able to fling himself back out of range. His face reddened in anger, the scars from old wounds standing out in stark relief. Fights against those far stronger than him had long instilled an important lesson. Take the high ground.

Easily avoiding the next swing of the knife, Tarzan retreated into the shadows. After quickly packing the wound with the right kind of moss, he shimmied up a tree to the safety of the overarching canopy. Making his way with the silence borne of long practice, his scouting was rewarded with the view of his long-haired prey, who was standing, knife readied, with his back pressed to the bark of a tree.

Tarzan circled around to the branches above him, always staying downwind to minimize what scent could drift to the elder man. Retrieving a handy slingstone from his pouch, Tarzan angled it so it would land on the far side of the trunk. As his prey instinctively turned towards the sound, Tarzan dropped a loose loop of rope around the knife hand and pulled it tight against the wrist. As the man was reacting to the sudden impediment to his movements, Tarzan landed on him with his full weight and skill.

Afterwards, Tarzan bound the arms and legs of the unconscious man and pulled him to a spot roughly halfway between the squirming child and the treeline. Retreating to the edge of the clearing, having decided to avoid the ground around the child in case of further surprises, Tarzan settled into wait. Not having anything better to do, Tarzan spent some time practicing his aim by pelting the sleeping man's face with small pebbles until he woke, spluttering and trying to prop himself up.

A sudden calm came over the man as he analyzed his surroundings with an icy glare. Clearly having seen no advantages in putting off his rage, he began spitting out long and angry strings of sounds that Tarzan vaguely recognized as the sort that Jane Porter had made. It still amazed Tarzan that humans could be spread across such a large territory that the regional differences in language could deepen into incomprehensibility.

As an artifact of his upbringing, Tarzan thought in the gesture and guttural sounds of the great apes and in the printed form of English, the human language shaping the higher concepts of reality and the ape language underpinning it with a visceral quality especially in terms of physical skills and _smells_ which he'd found woefully underdescribed in books.

"Enough of this," Tarzan shouted in the sole spoken human language he was fluent in. "Do you speak French?"

"Of course I speak _French_," Holtz cried, responding in kind, his accent having been carefully minimized through years of training. "I'm educated, unlike you bloody _modern _people!"

Tarzan stared at him incredulously for a few seconds.

Holtz looked down and sighed. "Ah... Sorry, I've been repressing a lot of rage from another time and place."

* * *

_Having been forcibly stranded on the coast of Africa, the Porters and their fellow castaways took refuge in the cabin built by Tarzan's parents. Tarzan helped the group, communicating to them through written notes, with the odd result of them becoming convinced that the mute 'forest god' and the unseen but literate 'Tarzan of the Apes' were two different people. Some time later, a French rescue party arrived by ship and one of its members was kidnapped and apparently murdered by a small splinter tribe that had, in fleeing colonial occupation to the north, responded to their harsh treatment by rebuilding what was left of their culture in all the wrong ways._

_Tarzan, in rescuing the Frenchman, D'Arnot, and nursing him back to health, missed the boat back to populated waters. After an overland trip and several months learning spoken French, human culture and the value of money, Tarzan chartered a boat to his home territory to retrieve a treasure chest he'd liberated from the murderous mutineers that had stranded the Porters months before._


	3. Through the Trees

BtVS/Angel by Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The fable here is adapted from one retold in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. It's definitely like Aesop, but the exact origin's hard to pin down.

* * *

**Coastal Africa, 'Hollow-Earth'**

Connor, feeling ignored, let loose another wail. He missed his home and his odd family. Mid-cry, he coughed, releasing a puff of golden radiance that hung about his head in a bright halo. Entranced by the cloud of sparkles, he quieted down and soon drifted off into slumber.

Catching Tarzan's gaze, Holtz shrugged as well as he could. "Don't ask me, he's been doing that for two days. They've been tapering off." Remembering something that had been bothering him, Holtz put together a cover story. "The first one was much larger and must have affected us, or at least my mind, somehow, as the next thing I remember, we were by the earthen drum over there. I've been trying to cut a path to civilization since we arrived, but the best I've managed through the vines and the creepers and these _damn_ trees is to reach a trickle of water. How did you find this place? There a path through one of those hills?"

Tarzan laughed and pointed upwards. "I'm afraid that my tribe congregates here because there is no decent ground route until much further out. Unless you can manage to pull yourself to the canopy and step from branch to branch, you may very well be stuck. Myself, I swing freely through the trees, a skill that I find sorely lacking in _civilized_ places."

Holtz chuckled softly. "Seems like we might have more in common then we thought. I apologize for the short stabbing. You have to understand that I am protective of my son and your odd manner of dress was not reassuring in the slightest." He gave a short smile and flexed a bound arm slightly upwards. "My name is Daniel and the babe over there," he said, having already decided on Connor's new identity. "Is Steven."

If he'd managed to escape with Justine and Connor as planned, Holtz would've made them a proper family with a new last name to prevent the paper trails of the modern world leading directly to them. While arriving through a portal implied that being tracked was the least of his worries, he was putting off telling his full name until he had a better feel of what he'd landed in.

Grinning freely as he sat down, Tarzan nodded in the direction of the coast. "I am Tarzan of the Apes and, yes, I'm afraid I've gone and left my freshly pressed suit back on my ship. I'm here on my own errand, which I'd rather perform while not under the scrutiny of someone who has freshly raised a weapon against me, even with the understandable circumstances."

Tarzan scratched his chin in thought. "Seems that here, especially bound, you'd be easy prey for any ape that happened across. There is a cabin a short distance away from where my boat lies in anchor. You are welcome to use it until we are ready to leave. I only ask that you leave your weapons here so that I may later retrieve them and disarm any traps you may have set. My people and their children often play here, no need to leave surprises for them."

##

Through careful application of woven ropes and cloth an adequate harnessing system was created for Tarzan, with his immense strength, to safely bear the other two with him through the branches of the trees.

"It is some distance away," Tarzan said as he carefully avoided the tree where he'd hidden his digging spade on hearing Connor's cry. "So I must ask for your patience. We'll stop at some point after the brush thins out, so you can stretch a bit."

Holtz passed the time staring deep into the jungle. After awhile, he spoke. "This reminds me of the tale of the Frog and the Scorpion. There was a Scorpion who could not swim who had been forced onto a small island by rising waters and soon even that would be lost. A large Frog happened by and seeing that the only thing separating the Scorpion from safety was, from his perspective, a small stream, offered the Scorpion a ride on his back. Half-way there, the Scorpion stung him so they would both drown."

His arms and legs not missing a beat in their dance through the trees, Tarzan spoke up to finish the story. "And when the Frog asked why, the Scorpion replied, 'because it is my nature.' Many fables were among the books I taught myself to read on. The tales of Aesop and those inspired by him were some of my favorites. It took me years to work out that the idea of animals having a language in reality could be seen by others as strange."

"So, Daniel," Tarzan continued with a dark chuckle. "Keeping in mind that the noose could as easily have wound around your neck as your wrist and I chose the path of least harm, I have to ask. What is your nature?"

Holtz stared into the lengthening shadows as night slowly fell, his mind on the family that Angelus had stolen from him so many years before... "I had a drive, an ambition, which was paid for in the blood of my family when the murderers I sought to bring to justice decided they were too tempting a target to pass up. My nature is a weapon and I dream of honing my son into the tool I should have been, something that could have saved his mother, his twin brother and the elder sister he never really had the chance to know..."


End file.
